The baseball league is on, students have begun returning to school, and people are increasingly dining out and enjoying nighttime strolls in public parks.
As South Korea significantly relaxes its rigid social distancing rules as a result of waning COVID-19 cases, the world is paying close attention to whether it can return to something that resembles normal — or face a resurgence of the novel coronavirus.
Already, a mini-outbreak linked to nightclubs in Seoul has tested South Korea’s widely praised method for dealing with the disease — essentially a combination of rapid tracing, testing and treatment, along with stringent social distancing practices.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“Other countries must be wondering whether our nation will continue to make good progress,” said Kim Jin-yong, a doctor at Incheon Medical Center near Seoul who confirmed South Korea’s first patient on Jan. 20 and has since treated more than 100 others. “But I can’t predict with authority what will happen here from now on.”
South Korea once had the world’s largest number of COVID-19 cases outside of China, but its daily caseload has since dropped to about 10 to 30 and occasionally has hit single digits in the past few weeks.
However, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) yesterday reported its biggest jump in infections in seven weeks, driven by a fresh cluster at an e-commerce warehouse on Seoul’s outskirts.
Officials announced 40 new cases, with most new infections from the Seoul metropolitan area.
An outbreak at a warehouse of e-commerce firm Coupang in Bucheon, west of Seoul, has resulted in 36 cases so far, the KCDC said.
“It is suspected that the basic regulations were not enforced at the warehouse,” South Korean Vice Minister of Health and Welfare Kim Gang-lip said. “If quarantine rules are not implemented at workplaces, it could lead to a dreadful result of a mass infection.”
The earlier uptick in fresh infections linked to nightclubs in Seoul’s Itaewon entertainment district has raised fears of another big outbreak.
Since that outbreak’s first patient was associated with the nightclubs on May 6 — the same day the social distancing policy was officially eased — South Korea has confirmed more than 250 related cases.
It is unclear how things will play out, but so far the outbreak has not grown, unlike what happened in late February and early March, when hundreds of new patients were reported each day, many of them tied to a controversial church gathering in the country’s southeast.
The tried and tested methods of aggressive tracing, testing and treatment, and the widespread public use of masks again played a major role in preventing the outbreak in Itaewon from exploding, said Lee Hyuk-min, a professor at Yonsei University’s College of Medicine in Seoul.
South Korean officials previously said that the nation was approaching its economic and social limits.
However, Lee said that the government now has to think about whether it can tolerate small outbreaks and let the economy operate smoothly, or if it should restore strict social distancing rules.
Meanwhile, daily life — of a sort — has resumed.
Long-delayed baseball and soccer seasons began without fans in the stands. Public parks, museums and outdoor leisure facilities have reopened. High-school seniors returned to class last week, and younger students are to do the same in phases by June 8.
These days, at lunchtime, restaurants in downtown Seoul are crowded with office workers and many have stopped working from home. In the evening rush hours, subways are packed with commuters wearing masks. At night, in a park in western Seoul, it is easy to find young couples strolling without masks.
South Korea’s quarantine campaign is often compared with that of the US, UK and Italy, some of the hardest-hit countries. They all noticed their first cases in late January.
South Korea launched widespread testing fairly early, and in early February it had open public testing, which was available to asymptomatic people, and pursued contact tracing for all confirmed patients.
Italy’s testing increased much more slowly. In the case of the UK, despite its early head start on testing, there were signs that it was not able to keep up with the outbreak.
Testing in the US began in earnest in mid-March, according to a recent analysis in Our World in Data, a nonprofit online scientific publication based at the University of Oxford.
Of the 5.6 million people infected worldwide, the US tops the list with about 1.6 million, while the UK and Italy have more than 230,000 cases each.
South Korea has recorded a total of 11,265 cases with 269 deaths.
Jung Jae-hun, a professor at Gachon University’s School of Medicine, said that lifting restrictions in the US, UK and Italy will likely cause a second wave of COVID-19 that could be “much bigger and more severe.”
In South Korea, officials said that the reopening of schools would likely be a major yardstick for whether authorities can maintain the relaxed restrictions.
There is a sense that South Korea’s hard-won gains could be reversed without vigilance.
“South Korea will face a second virus wave, too. Whether there are outbreaks that are 10 times bigger than what happened in Itaewon or smaller ones, we’ll continue to see them,” Kim said. “If we consider our high population density ... we are rather more vulnerable to the virus than [even the US].”
Additional reporting by AFP
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